All human activities involve interacting with “entities,” i.e., things real and imagined in our internal and external environments. Examples of entities include: people, places, organizations, companies, restaurants, movies, books, products, ideas, beliefs, theories, events . . . thousands of types of things we can uniquely perceive, understand, and name. Only a few of these entities are currently directly addressable by the Internet. The vast majority is not.
As people interact with entities, the human brain acquires knowledge about them, allowing future interactions to be more efficient. Some of this knowledge is passed on to future generations. Thus, there are two well-known repositories of encoded knowledge in humans: DNA (which encodes knowledge inherited from our ancestors) and memories (which encode knowledge we gain through our personal interactions with entities in the form of cellular changes to neurons in the brain). These knowledge structures help us interact with things in our environment more efficiently.
As described below, the Intelligent Internet system, according to one example, augments these two repositories, by providing a virtual networked system with the capacity to acquire, encode, store, access, use and share many types of collective knowledge known to humans and machines.
The Internet was originally designed as a network of networks, a mechanism for connecting computer servers, devices called terminals, content files and software applications. Each device connected by the Internet is assigned its own “Internet Protocol Address” (IP address), a numerical label assigned, often dynamically, to each device participating in computer networks that use the Internet Protocol for communication. Over time, the Internet has evolved to connect billions of devices, each such device having its own assigned IP address and each able to communicate efficiently with other devices having assigned IP addresses via the Internet.
Today's Internet has two major deficiencies: 1) it lacks an innate ability to acquire and apply knowledge about the entities it connects, and 2) it does not allow users to connect directly to and interact with the vast majority of entities currently lacking assigned IP addresses, for example: people, places, events and other things the human brain is able to recognize, understand and interact with. These deficiencies currently lack a commercially viable solution.
As a result, there is a major disconnect between a system that knows only how to locate and communicate with things having assigned IP addresses (devices, files and applications) and a fundamental need of many users to locate, connect with, learn about and interact with things of interest to them, most of which do not have assigned IP addresses. Today's Internet and the human brain essentially speak two different languages.
Thus far, the World Wide Web has been the most successful attempt to bridge this disconnect. The Web essentially allows us to create 2-dimensional “hypertext” connections between a tagged object in a file and a related addressable file, and very importantly the hypertext tags are capable of pointing only to a single IP address or a URL associated with an IP address. However, the Web only understands “files” while the human brain understands “things,” i.e. entities. Both the Internet and the Web speak languages difficult for the human brain to decipher. The Web places upon its users the burden of making sense of the files with which it is capable of connecting. It only helps users connect with “things” that have assigned IP addresses. Once connected with these “things” users must do most of the work thereafter.
The Web has a number of other important deficiencies related to control and risk. Hypertext links are controlled by website owners, not users. Users who click on or touch a hyperlinked object typically have little idea where they may be taken, and indeed may end up accessing dangerous files. The World Wide Web paradigm has resulted in the creation of hundreds of millions of websites controlled by owners and operators of unknown reputation, each website having its own custom-made user interface.
A more recent paradigm called the “Semantic Web” has partially addressed the inability of the Web to understand “things.” The Semantic Web organizes and stores two major kinds of knowledge (facts and relationships) about things in file structures that computers can understand. The Semantic Web generally uses a file structure called “Resource Description Framework” (RDF) which decomposes knowledge into small pieces. Today there are billions of RDF records from resources such as Wikipedia and The New York Times that contain snippets of knowledge accessible by devices connected to the Internet.
However, the Semantic Web has its own major deficiencies, including: 1) most importantly, like the Internet and World Wide Web, it lacks an innate capacity to acquire and apply knowledge; 2) it is designed to enable computers to understand its content, not humans; and 3) it stores only a few simple types of the knowledge that we humans consider useful or even essential for interacting with things of interest to us in our environment.
A widely accessible definition of “Intelligence” is: “the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.” (See, e.g., American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.) As described herein, the Intelligent Internet system, according to one example, augments the capabilities of today's Internet by creating a networked system with the capacity to acquire, organize, encode, store, access, apply and share many types of knowledge about entities currently connected by the Internet, as well as entities not currently connected by the Internet.
The Intelligent Internet system, according to one example, has the capacity to directly acquire knowledge about human behaviors because it is a single unified system that allows users to interact directly with entities. It organically integrates the user interface, user interactions with entities, and an operating system having access to knowledge and resources, eliminating complex junction points between them. Alternate paradigms such as the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web and Mobile Apps all have complex junction points between the user interface, applications, operating system and various chaotic resources.
Entities can be difficult for both humans and machines to recognize and disambiguate. A major challenge in recognizing and disambiguating among entities is the fact that a specific entity may be represented by differing “symbolic objects.” These symbolic objects appear everywhere in our environment: on display screens of devices, in things we see with our eyes or hear with our ears. They can include names (“Tim Berners Lee”), nicknames, aliases, images, videos, IDs, codes. They can appear in hundreds of types of computer readable content, such as news, tweets, messages, quotations, etc.
A user of the Intelligent Internet system, in one embodiment, can directly learn about these symbolic objects and the entities they represent without the aid of the World Wide Web, for example, by: selecting or specifying an entity of interest using a Smart Phone, tablet, PC, Smart TV or other computing and communications devices or by capturing images or videos of entities of using digital cameras or other imaging devices; etc.
In one example, the Intelligent Internet organizes, encodes and stores knowledge about entities in a new type of pol-dimensional digital structure referred to as “knowledge cells.” Each of these knowledge cells represents the intersection of at least an entity and a content object. For example, a knowledge cell may represent the intersection of a single person, place, company, event, belief or other type of entity and a single content object such as a news article, a tweet or other type of content. In this example, the Intelligent Internet implements knowledge cells as poly-dimensional digital structures, each of which encodes a rich set of knowledge about a specific entity, including: factual knowledge about this entity; knowledge about relationships between this entity and other entities; knowledge about valid methods for interacting with this entity by humans and machines; knowledge about ratings, reviews and opinions; knowledge providing guides, guidelines and procedures for interacting with this entity.
In one embodiment, the encoded factual knowledge includes properties classified as “knowledge markers, which collectively have the capacity to uniquely describe an entity, thus allowing humans and machines to more efficiently disambiguate among entities.
In one example of the current invention, the Intelligent Internet provides a rich library of “Smart Interaction Modules” (“SIMs”), software that implements standardized methods for interacting with entities. Users accessing the Intelligent Internet with touch-enabled mobile devices or tablets can directly access these Smart Interaction Modules simply by touching any symbolic object wherever they encounter it . . . in a news article, a tweet, an image, a video or on a website. Users accessing the Internet with other types of devices can directly access these Smart Interaction Methods by using a point and click mechanism or by speaking to select an entity or specify it.
One aspect of the current invention implements a new unified paradigm to help users interact with entities of personal interest to them, including, for example: 1) a uniform scheme for uniquely identifying all types of entities (e.g. unique entity IDs); 2) an efficient multi-dimensional structure for encoding, organizing and storing our collective knowledge about entities; 3) one-step access to useful knowledge about entities of personal interest; 4) a standardized library of smart methods for interacting with entities; 5) a simplified way to learn about updates concerning entities; and 6) a simple, adaptive user interface that understands users, their context and the entities of interest to them, and adapts dynamically to help users interact with these entities and 7) a simplified, more efficient and secure way to communicate messages of all types.
In one aspect and example, the intelligent Internet system is a universal networked system that acquires, accumulates and efficiently stores knowledge about entities and symbolic objects representing these entities, and makes this knowledge easily available to users.
In another aspect and example, the Intelligent Internet system has the capacity to acquire and accumulate knowledge about entities from numerous diverse resources, including: news feeds, tweets, Web Services, Open Linked Content, Websites, digital publications, computer files, office documents and user behaviors and inputs.
In another aspect and example, the Intelligent Internet system, enables users to directly access knowledge about a symbolic object they see on the screen of a Smart Phone, tablet, PC or other Smart Device, simply by touching the symbolic object.